The “China” Argument Against Trump’s Spending Cuts Is Bogus

The anti-Trump left are all suddenly hard-line China hawks?

A graphic from a June 2023 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office traced the flow of NIH and USAID funds to China’s Academy of Military Medical Sciences and Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Whatever merits—or flaws—there may be around President Trump’s plans to cut back spending on the U.S. Agency for International Development and reduce research grant “indirect cost” overhead spending from the National Institutes of Health, a little-noticed and somewhat comical side effect is that suddenly, the anti-Trump left are all hard-line China hawks.

Ben Rhodes, who as President Obama’s deputy national security adviser championed an Iran nuclear deal that allowed Iranian energy to fuel Chinese growth, takes to the New York Times opinion pages to oppose the AID cuts on the grounds that they’d create a vacuum for China to fill. “The Elon Musk-supervised shuttering of U.S.A.I.D. is something that is already happening, with tangible consequences not only for the people around the world who depend on the agency but also for Americans who expect their government to prevent the spread of terrorism, disease and the global influence of the Chinese Communist Party,” Rhodes writes. “Stripped of U.S.A.I.D. funding, struggling under the weight of tariffs, nations including U.S. allies may now look to China as a more predictable source of trade and investment.”

The rest of the Sunday Times opinion section is full of similar complaints about how Trump is supposedly good for China. Michelle Goldberg, writing about Trump’s Gaza Riviera plan: “He has created a de facto justification not only for Israeli expansionism, but for Chinese and Russian expansionism as well.” Ross Douthat (okay, he’s a conservative): “So long as America remains a global power with an imperial footprint, we should wish to appear more benevolent than our Chinese and Russian rivals.” For a moment, I wasn’t sure if it was the New York Times opinion section or some arch-anticommunist Cold War-era Republican-leaning publication like Human Events.

Academic medicine has come down with a similar concern:

Jeremy Faust, MD

of the Inside Medicine Substack writes, “I also asked my former Harvard colleague Professor Edward Boyer (now at The Ohio State University) for a quick reaction. He put it bluntly: ‘China just became the leader in biomedical research.’”

The newfound concern about Chinese influence is touching, but the timing is suspicious, raising concerns about whether this crowd is sincerely worried about China, or is simply conveniently seizing on it as an argument to preserve spending that it doesn’t want cut.